Anna Q. Nilsson
Encyclopedia
Anna Quirentia Nilsson was a Swedish
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 born American actress who achieved success in American silent movies
Silent Movies
Silent Movies are 13 solo guitar compositions by Marc Ribot released September 28, 2010 on Pi Recordings.-Reception:The Allmusic review by Thom Jurek awarded the album 4 stars stating "For those interested in one of the more compelling and quietly provocative and graceful guitar records of 2010,...

.

Background

Anna Q. Nilsson was born in Ystad
Ystad
Ystad is a "locality", or town, and the seat of Ystad Municipality, Skåne County, Sweden, with 17,286 inhabitants .Settlement dates back to the 11th century and the town has become a busy ferryport, local administrative centre and tourist attraction...

, Skåne County
Skåne County
Skåne County is the southernmost administrative county or län, of Sweden, basically corresponding to the historical province Scania. It borders the counties of Halland, Kronoberg and Blekinge. The seat of residence for the Skåne Governor is the town of Malmö...

, Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 in 1888. Her middle name, "Quirentia " is derived from her date of birth, March 30 Saint Quirinius' Day
Saint Quirinus of Rome
Saint Quirinus of Tegernsee, or Quirinus of Rome , is venerated as a martyr and saint of the third century....

. When she was 8 years old her father got a job at the local sugar factory in Hasslarp
Hasslarp
Hasslarp is a locality situated in Helsingborg Municipality, Skåne County, Sweden with 447 inhabitants in 2005....

, a small community outside Helsingborg
Helsingborg
Helsingborg is a city and the seat of Helsingborg Municipality, Skåne County, Sweden with 97,122 inhabitants in 2010. Helsingborg is the centre of an area in the Øresund region of about 320,000 inhabitants in north-west Scania, and is Sweden's closest point to Denmark, with the Danish city...

 in Sweden where she spent most of her school years. She did very well in school, graduating with highest marks. Due to her good grades she was hired as sales clerk in Halmstad
Halmstad
Halmstad is a port, university, industrial and recreational city at the mouth of Nissan in the province of Halland on the Swedish west coast. Halmstad is the seat of Halmstad Municipality and the capital of Halland County...

 on the Swedish west coast, unusual for a young woman from a worker's family at the time. But she had set her mind on going to America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

Career

In 1905, she emigrated to the United States through Ellis Island
Ellis Island
Ellis Island in New York Harbor was the gateway for millions of immigrants to the United States. It was the nation's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954. The island was greatly expanded with landfill between 1892 and 1934. Before that, the much smaller original island was the...

. In the new country, the Swedish teenager started working as a nursemaid
Nursemaid
A nursemaid or nursery maid, is mostly a historical term of employment for a female servant in an elite household. In the 21st century, the position is largely defunct, owing to the relatively small number of households who maintain large staffs with the traditional hierarchy.The nursery maid...

 and learned English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 quickly. Soon she started working as a model
Model (person)
A model , sometimes called a mannequin, is a person who is employed to display, advertise and promote commercial products or to serve as a subject of works of art....

. Already in 1907, she was named "Most beautiful woman in America". Penrhyn Stanlaws (1877–1957), one of the most successful and sought after cover artists of his day, picked Anna Q. Nilsson to become one of his models.

Nilsson's modeling led her to getting a role in the 1911
1911 in film
The year 1911 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*March 23: D.W Griffith shows the first major close-up shot on film with the successful release of The Lonedale Operator proving his ever growing mastery of how to utilise film....

 film Molly Pitcher. Films of special note for Anna were Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917), Soldiers of Fortune (1919), The Toll Gate and The Luck of the Irish (both 1920), and The Lotus Eater
The Lotus Eater (1921 film)
The Lotus Eater is a silent 1921 drama film produced and directed by Marshall Neilan and released through Associated First National.-Story:...

(1921).

She stayed at the Kalem studio for several years, ranked behind their top star Alice Joyce
Alice Joyce
Alice Joyce was an American actress, who appeared in more than 200 movies during the 1910s and 1920s, perhaps best known for her roles in the 1923 silent and 1930 talking versions of The Green Goddess....

. In the twenties she freelanced successfully for Paramount, First National and many other studios and reached a peak of popularity just before the advent of talkies, despite a serious horse-riding accident which kept her from filming for almost two years. In 1923, she portrayed "Cherry Malotte" in the second movie based upon Rex Beach
Rex Beach
Rex Ellingwood Beach was an American novelist, playwright, and Olympic water polo player.- Biography :...

's The Spoilers
The Spoilers (1923 film)
The Spoilers is a 1923 silent film directed by Lambert Hillyer. It is set in Nome, Alaska during the 1898 Gold Rush, with Milton Sills as Roy Glennister, Anna Q. Nilsson as Cherry Malotte, and Noah Beery, Sr. as Alex McNamara. The film culminates in a saloon fistfight between Glennister and...

, a role that would be played in later versions by Betty Compson
Betty Compson
Betty Compson was an American actress. Born Eleanor Luicime Compson in Beaver, Utah, she had an extensive film career. Her father died when she was young, and she was forced to drop out of school and earn a living for herself and her mother...

 (1930), Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer.Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films...

 (1942), and Anne Baxter
Anne Baxter
Anne Baxter was an American actress known for her performances in films such as The Magnificent Ambersons , The Razor's Edge , All About Eve and The Ten Commandments .-Early life:...

 (1955).

In 1921 she returned to Sweden to record Värmlänningarna, her only Swedish movie. In 1926 she was named Hollywood's most popular woman. She welcomed royalty when the Swedish Crown Prince Gustav Adolf (later King Gustaf VI Adolf) and his wife Louise Mountbatten
Louise Mountbatten
Louise Alexandra Marie Irene Mountbatten became Queen consort of Sweden in 1950 and served as such until her death in 1965...

 visited Hollywood. In 1928 she struck a record of fan mail, 30 000 letters a month, and that year Joseph Kennedy brought her to his newly formed film company Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO). The following year as she was horse riding, she fell off the horse, was thrown against a stone wall and breaking her hip. After a year of hard training she was on her feet again.

'Talkies'

In 1928, Anna Nilsson made her last film of the silent era, Blockade
Blockade (1928 film)
-Cast:* Anna Q. Nilsson as Bess* Wallace MacDonald as Vincent* James Bradbury Sr. as Gwynn* Walter McGrail as Hayden...

. With the introduction of sound films, Nilsson's career went into a sharp decline, although she continued to play small, often uncredited parts in films into the 1950s. Between 1930 and 1950, she participated in 39 sound films, in smaller roles. She played the role of the Swedish immigrant grandmother of Loretta Young
Loretta Young
Loretta Young was an American actress. Starting as a child actress, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953...

 in The Farmers Daughter (1947). Her best known performance in a sound film is arguably her turn as "herself", referred to as one of Swanson's "waxworks" in Sunset Boulevard
Sunset Boulevard (film)
Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 American film noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, and produced and co-written by Charles Brackett...

(1950), where she has one small line. That she'd be remembered for her one role in Sunset Boulevard is in irony to the hundreds of silent film
Silent film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

s she appeared in.

Personal life

Anna was married to actor Guy Coombs (1916-16) and to Norwegian-American shoe merchant John Marshall Gunnerson (1923–25). Nilsson has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
Hollywood Walk of Fame
The Hollywood Walk of Fame consists of more than 2,400 five-pointed terrazzo and brass stars embedded in the sidewalks along fifteen blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and three blocks of Vine Street in Hollywood, California...

 at 6150 Hollywood Boulevard for her contribution to motion pictures. She was the first Swedish-born actress to receive such an honor. She died in Sun City, California
Sun City, California
Sun City is a former census-designated place in Riverside County, California, United States. It along with the neighboring communities of Quail Valley and Menifee incorporated as the City of Menifee on October 1, 2008. The population when Sun City was a CDP was 17,773 at the 2000 census...

, on February 11, 1974, of heart failure.

Selection of Films

  • 1911 – Molly Pitcher
  • 1915 - Regeneration
  • 1917 - Seven Keys to Baldpate
    Seven Keys to Baldpate
    Seven Keys to Baldpate is a 1917 silent film mystery produced by George M. Cohan and distributed by Artcraft Pictures, an affiliate of Paramount. It is based on Cohan's play of the novel by Earl Derr Biggers. Cohan himself stars in this silent version along with Anna Q. Nilsson and Hedda Hopper,...

  • 1919 - Auction of Souls (Ravished Armenia)
  • 1919 - Soldiers of Fortune
  • 1920 - The Toll Gate
  • 1920 - The Luck of the Irish
  • 1921 - The Lotus Eater
    The Lotus Eater (1921 film)
    The Lotus Eater is a silent 1921 drama film produced and directed by Marshall Neilan and released through Associated First National.-Story:...

  • 1921 - Värmlänningarna
  • 1923 - Ponjola
    Ponjola
    Ponjola is a 1923 silent film melodrama based on a novel by Cynthia Stockley, distributed by First National Pictures and directed by either Donald Crisp or James Young or both. A print survives in the possession of a private collector. This film stars Anna Q. Nilsson in a role in which she...

  • 1926 - Miss Nobody
    Miss Nobody
    Miss Nobody is a 1926 silent film drama produced and distributed by First National Pictures and directed by Lambert Hillyer. The film is based on a short story by Tiffany Wells called "Shebo"; the likely feminine pronunciation of hobo. The stars of the film were Anna Q. Nilsson and Walter Pidgeon,...

  • 1926 - The Greater Glory
    The Greater Glory
    The Greater Glory is a 1926 silent drama film directed by Curt Rehfeld, starring Conway Tearle and featuring Boris Karloff. This film is sometimes listed as The Viennese Medley, the title of Edith O'Shaughnessy's novel of which the film is based. The film is lost.-Cast:* Conway Tearle - Count...

  • 1927 - The Masked Woman
  • 1928 - The Whip
  • 1928 - Blockade
    Blockade (1928 film)
    -Cast:* Anna Q. Nilsson as Bess* Wallace MacDonald as Vincent* James Bradbury Sr. as Gwynn* Walter McGrail as Hayden...

  • 1947 - The Farmer's Daughter
  • 1950 – Sunset Boulevard
    Sunset Boulevard (film)
    Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 American film noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, and produced and co-written by Charles Brackett...

  • 1951 - An American in Paris
    An American in Paris
    An American in Paris is a symphonic tone poem by the American composer George Gershwin, written in 1928. Inspired by the time Gershwin had spent in Paris, it evokes the sights and energy of the French capital in the 1920s. It is one of Gershwin's best-known compositions.Gershwin composed the piece...

  • 1954 - Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a 1954 musical film directed by Stanley Donen, with music by Saul Chaplin and Gene de Paul, and lyrics by Johnny Mercer....


Further reading

  • Swanson, Gloria: Swanson on Swanson, The Making of a Hollywood Legend. Hamlyn, 1981. ISBN 0-600-20496-0
  • Wollstein, Hans J. Strangers in Hollywood: the history of Scandinavian actors in American films from 1910 to World War II (Scarecrow Press. 1994) ISBN 978-0810829381

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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